This used to be a wrapper around shellwords.pl, but has now been superseded by Text::ParseWords. Use that module insteade. If you use this module, it will simply report the shellwords() function from Text::ParseWords.

The old description follows:

This is a thin wrapper around the shellwords.pl package, which comes preinstalled with Perl. This module imports a single subroutine, shellwords(). The shellwords() routine parses lines of text and returns a set of tokens using the same rules that the Unix shell does for its command-line arguments. Tokens are separated by whitespace, and can be delimited by single or double quotes. The module also respects backslash escapes.

If called with one or more arguments, shellwords() will treat each argument as a line of text, parse it, and return the tokens.

Note that the old behavior of parsing $_ if no arguments are provided is no longer supported. Sorry.